Book news

Dear readers! It took some time, but I finally outsmarted those turkeys and am back at my desk, just in time for the impending release of The Possessed, which you can preorder right now from Amazon for the low, low price of $10.12. Those with concerns about my interns’ nutritional intake are particularly encouraged you to order from one of the links on this page: that way, thanks to the Amazon Associates program, we get 4% extra per copy.

That means for every copy you buy, we get $0.40: the cost of approximately 1.78 fl. oz. Ensure High Protein Complete Balanced Nutrition Drink!

Because I am such a delicate, retiring flower, reviews still really freak me out, even positive ones—I’m too scared to actually read them, so I just forward them right away to my parents. However, my much-respected editor at FSG just emailed me the concluding line of the LA Times piece, and I was deeply moved to learn that, “If Susan Sontag had coupled with Buster Keaton, their prodigiously gifted love child might have written this book.” Honestly, though, I was also slightly freaked out, and didn’t forward the link to my parents, who, it occurred to me, might conceivably resent the usurping of their vital roles in my physical and intellectual growth by Ms. Sontag and Mr. Keaton—to whom, oddly, they bear no readily apparent resemblance. I guess that’s the kind of mystery Viktor Shklovsky had in mind when he wrote that “the legacy… from one literary generation to the next moves not from father to son but from uncle to nephew.”

Dear Bay Area readers! I warmly invite you to the book launch for The Possessed, to be heldon Wednesday February 24 at 7pm at the illustrious City Lights Bookstore. I am told that there will be vodka martinis. I believe the vodka martini was Tolstoy’s favorite kind of martini.

In March, I will be doing more readings in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York:

In April–May, I’m really hoping to get to Chicago and New Orleans, two beautiful metropolitan areas which are home to some of my favorite dear readers. Nothing definite yet, though—really it depends whether my interns can build up enough muscle mass by then. Remember, every little bit counts!

This entry was posted
on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

dear elif,
i spent four years in the PG.3776’s of the university of chicago, and wrote my BA thesis on fyodorov and platonov, etc. i read the brothers karamazov for the first time in a bathtub in istanbul (where i sat through the night so as not to wake any of my fellow travelers with the lights), and spent one september of my life drinking samagon and digging potatoes with old believers. since tuesday, when i acquired your book, i have been making calculations like whether i should walk down the metro escalator and miss 26 seconds of potentially reading of the possessed, or make the train. i routinely decided it was worth reading instead, because the worst that would happen when i missed the train was that i’d stand reading your book for another seven minutes, which is what i was going to do when i got home, anyways. i work at an independent bookstore in dc, and i have been putting it in everyone’s hand, and this week i might have semi-dramatically read it aloud to my coworkers, and also, sent a copy to my comp lit friend from samarkand.
thank you, it’s wonderful! and anthemic (which you surely won’t hear in the reviews) for people such as i.

Weeks on list: 1 • In The Possessed, Elif Batuman explores the lives of the great Russian authors, from Pushkin to Platonov, and of the people they continue to influence up through today. She retraces Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucuses, explores why Old Uzbek has a hundred different words for crying and visits an 18th century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva River in Russia.

The Leonard Lopate Show
Monday, March 15, 2010
Airs weekdays at 12PM on 93.9 FM and AM 820

“Treasures and the Treasury

“We’ll get two takes on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—from The New Yorker’s John Cassidy and The Atlantic’s Joshua Green. Then, Elif Batuman talks about the great Russian novelists…and the people who read them. And Paddy Moloney, leader of The Chieftains, the most popular traditional Irish music group in the world, discusses their latest album. Plus, geopolitics expert Charles Emmerson looks ahead to what the future might hold for the Arctic.”

So, Elif, lured in by the NYT review today (how did I miss the first one?) I am going down to B&N this evening to see if they have your book. There are already 3 holds on each copy at the library, and I can’t wait.

The h eadline sucked me in right away – a generation ahead of you, I, too, fell for Russian language and literature (the exact title of my undergrad degree), tho’ I’m more the language/linguistics end of the passion. Oblomov? (I read your earlier posts) Shudder. I couldn’t cope with Oblomov, too much like my own struggle with depression, which makes me want to sleep when in the throes of it. But AK? W&P? The Possessed? er, the Devils?
Yes, yes, yes.
молодеец, дорогая!
If you’d put San Antonio on your book tour, I’d take you out to our “Russian Bar,” or to the Twig, our independent bookstore, or both. Or whatever. Can’t wait to read the book.

‘The Possessed’” A fun glimpse into Russian literature
Elif Batuman explores the minds behind great Russian novels in this witty, intelligent and fun book.
By ANDREA HOAG, Special to the Star Tribune
Last update: April 6, 2010 – 2:01 PM

If you’re anything like me, you will love a book being released in Australia today, The Possessed, by Elif Batuman (Text). It’s a passionate, personalised journey through Russian literature, its authors, and the people who read and write about them. Definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year – warm, smart, sweet, poignant, even slightly eccentric. Quite captivating, especially if you’re already passionate about literature. I’ll be interviewing the author on the blog soon, too!

Also recommended: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman. “A hilarious collection” of essays and travel stories about people who obsess about Russian novels. [Laura] Miller says even if you can’t get through a Russian novel, you’ll find something to laugh about in this book.

“Palo Alto is often portrayed as a boring and staid address, the southernmost fringes where hip San Francisco fades into the dull heart of Silicon Valley. The most recent Times Literary Supplement to arrive in my mailbox makes it seem positively exotic.

“Andrew Kahn reviews Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.”

“[By] Charlotte Ashley [who] is a bookseller, book collector, book historian and Alexandre Dumas fanatic.”

“The best book I’ve read in a long time is Elif Batuman’s The Possessed. No, maybe not the best. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum was amazing. So was Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators. But I haven’t been as engaged by any book this year the way The Possessed engaged me.”

“The Possessed was side-splittingly hilarious, insightful and inspiring. These were good stories. The complex connections she can draw between her life, the lives of her beloved Russian masters, and the universal experience of life did justice to her ambitions. I’d read anything Batuman writes now, right down to a laundry list. She has authority, experience, insight and style. What more can a novelist boast?”

New York Times
Holiday Gift Guide
Dwight Garner’s Top 10 Books of 2010
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: November 23, 2010

[. . .]

THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM by Elif Batuman. Ms. Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book is ostensibly about her favorite Russian authors but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs and how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. It asks this plaintive question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books? (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15)

THE POSSESSED: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. By Elif Batuman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $15.) An entertaining memoir-cum-travelogue of a graduate student’s improbable education in Russian language and literature.

The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Reading is strange, when you think about it. And writing about reading, especially about the delirium of obsessed readers, the madness and melancholy of book lovers and scholars, can be even stranger. Few writers can capture these Chekhovian love affairs with the deadpan humor, charm, affection—and pitch-perfect voice—that Elif Batuman brings to The Possessed.

If you love reading you will love this book, which ranges from Batuman’s half-serious (I think) effort to prove to Tolstoy scholars that Tolstoy was murdered, to a summer trip to Samarkand which results in a hilariously Borgesian attempt to explain the impossibly convoluted evolution of the Old Uzbek language. “What did you know about Uzbekistan once you learned that Old Uzbek had a hundred different words for crying?” she asks herself. “I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem to bode well for my summer vacation.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, “Spectator” columnist

Other great books I happened to read that came out in 2010 were Elif Batuman’s The Possessed; Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask; and Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey. I recommend all three without reservation; they are instant classics.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them, by Elif Batuman. The kind of book you want to read out loud to people on the train. If you don’t pee your pants laughing, it’s because you’re dead. Not exactly a review, but we wrote about it here.[*]

The New Yorker
The Book Bench
December 17, 2010
The Year in Reading: Rebecca Mead

One of the new books I had the most fun reading this year was “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,” by Elif Batuman. This smart, winning book charts the author’s encounters with Russian literature from Stanford to Samarkand, by way of St. Petersburg and Ankara. Inevitably, perhaps, a love affair is conducted (with her college boyfriend, Eric: doomed), interesting encounters with food occur (she is given an Uzbek lesson in watermelon selection), and a certain measure of insight is achieved (“Although I am reluctant to say that what ended in Samarkand was my youth, nonetheless, this copy of Past Days brought home to me, with a kind of material immediateness, the truth of human mortality”). It’s like “Eat Pray Love” for the Ph.D. set.

Outlook India
Books / Favourites Magazine | Dec 27, 2010
Web Extra
Non-Fiction
One has difficulty choosing between books that are interesting but add nothing to what is already general knowledge, and books that make you think anew…
Tabish Khair

[. . .]

Talking of novels and their writers, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books & the People who Read Them is a rollicking read, and not just for fans of Russian literature like me.

And in the past year, downhearted and listless again, most books have left me cold. But a few pulled me out of myself.

Among those: Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, Terry Castle’s The Professor, Justin Evans‘ A Good and Happy Child, Philip Hoare’s The Whale. These are books to counter the listlessness: tales of possession and obsession—romantic, intellectual, cetological, demonic. Elif and Terry’s books are the first of what I hope (but doubt) will be a new era in literary scholarship. Batuman and Castle take the subjects of their essays personally (Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Doestoevsky, Art Pepper, Susan Sontag) and the result of this entwining of personal and literary history is stunning. The insight that Batuman and Castle share is that the personal, the autobiographical, does not diminish intellectual arguments and aesthetic observations—it gives them more depth and resonance. In other words, ethos and logos can only get you so far. Pathos (only connect!) is the ultimate rhetorical tool. These books are also killingly funny and even frightening: Unbeknownst to many of themselves, artists and scholars are one of humanity’s most ridiculous and sinister subspecies and The Professor and The Possessed sketch these oddfellows (self portraits included) in all of their glory, absurdity, and monstrosity. Beautiful minds and black hearts abounding.

Hits, Misses and Sleepers of 2010
Year in books: Hits, misses and sleepers
The Associated Press
By HILLEL ITALIE AP National Writer
December 20, 2010 (AP)

[. . .]

—”Possessed,” by Elif Batuman, a scholar’s comic journey through classic Russian literature, complete with references to murder, McDonald’s and “King Kong.” ”Possessed” is now in its sixth printing, with sales of at least 15,000, according to Nielsen. Through much the first half of December, it was sold out on Amazon.com. “It’s a total hoot that has been a surprise hit with our customers all year long,” said Amazon senior editor Tom Nissley. “Elif Batuman makes the students of Russian literature into characters as bizarre and compelling as the ones in the novels they study.”

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman. FSG, $15 paper
Part adventure chronicle, part exegesis, part literary memoir, Batuman’s collection of essays is, above all, a love story. The book details paths she has taken to learn more about the objects of her devotion: the great works of Russian literature. First as an aspiring novelist, then as a doctoral student of literature and freelance writer for publications such as the New Yorker and n+1, she travels to far-flung locales—Uzbekistan, St. Petersburg, and Tolstoy’s estate. She pursues the dead writers’ footsteps and descendants, investigates a possible murder, learns Uzbek in Samarkand, tries and fails to get along with Isaac Babel’s wife and daughter, and visits a massive ice palace replicating one built in 1740 for the wedding of two royal jesters. Perhaps her most moving essay, however, “The Possessed,” involves no more than a group of Stanford literature graduate students in Palo Alto. They circle around a fellow student, Matej, whose preternatural charm inspires Batuman to compare him to the dangerously compelling central character of Dostoevky’s Demons. As the coterie forms and reforms around Matej, they learn from their professor René Girard his theory of mimetic desire, which posits that love is a form of egotism. Even as Batuman falls for Matej’s charm, she fights Girard’s teachings. She believes differently: that love leads to generosity, and the love of literature to greater understanding. In her comic, poignant, beguiling book, Batuman succeeds marvelously in illuminating her version of love.
—Reese Kwon

Recently, a blood relative with no past history of Russophilia took a Russian literature course in college. He was utterly enthralled and is now considering a year off to work in Mother Russia. Such is the power of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

This uniquely compelling force of Russian literature is the central theme of Batuman’s book, subtitled “Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.” Yet the “people” here are mainly Batuman herself, and The Possessed is largely a memoir of her intellectual explorations of the Russian literary landscape.

That does not make the book any less interesting. On the contrary, Batuman’s first person narrative enlivens her exploration. Her self-deprecation and (at times astonishingly frank) openness about her own personal life make this a fascinating read. There is a remarkable breadth and combination of unexpected elements, from a hilarious conference on Isaac Babel, to an episode of CSI Tula, to her own bizarre attempt to transfuse Russian culture and literature by way of extended stays in Uzbekistan.

In short, Batuman’s tale of personal discovery is as diverting and multi-threaded as a nineteenth century novel. And it’s a great summer read that will help you rediscover your own initial fascination with all things Russian.

Los Angeles Times
December 19, 2010
David Ulin’s favorite books of 2010

[. . .]

“The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” by Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 304 pp., $15 paper). Part memoir of the academic life, part engaging inquiry into the pleasures of Russian literature, Batuman’s debut is a bravura performance, a collection of essays about books and reading unlike any I’ve encountered before.

2. The Possessed
by Elif Batuman
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15)
“It’s not often that one laughs out loud while reading a book of literary criticism,” said Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor. But you will while reading Elif Batuman’s. In “seven delightfully quirky essays that combine travelogue and memoir with criticism,” the young Stanford Ph.D. takes us on “an unconventional odyssey through the world of Russian literature,” a place she obsessively turned to, she writes, in search of answers to “the riddle of human behavior and the nature of love.” The Possessed is an “odd and oddly profound little book,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Ostensibly about Russia’s legendary writers, it’s actually about “a million other things: grad school, literary theory, love affairs, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan.” Fundamentally, it’s a wry, whimsical, and thoroughly enjoyable examination of the ways we relate to the stories that move us.[. . .]

Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and founding editor of n+1.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq
The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar by Megan Stack
Forever War by Dexter Filkins
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason
Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams
And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould

Book Buzz: What were critics’ favorites titles this year? – USATODAY.com
By Jocelyn McClurg and Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

Best of the best: Which books published this year were voted the best by critics? PublishersMarketplace.com, a website for publishing professionals, has compiled a “Best of the Best of 2010″ list, with the top 10 titles in fiction and non-fiction. The website aggregated selections from 30 lists, including major retailers, top publications and individual critics. USA TODAY, The New York Times, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Oprah Magazine, Time, Slate and Entertainment Weekly were among those surveyed. The titles are listed in descending order of popularity:

[. . .]

Non-fiction

[. . .]

7. (tie) Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand; The Possessed by Elif Batuman; Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

Scott Martell, the reviewer of The Possessed for the Cleveland Plain Dealer,* chooses a couple of his favorite books from the past year:

“The other book that stood out for me was Elif Batuman’s highly enjoyable The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a look at just what the title says. But like all great essay collections, the power here lies in the voice.”

Publishers Lunch Deluxe: The Final List: Naming the Best of the Best of 2010
By Publishers Lunch
Jan 3, 2011 … Publishers Lunch Deluxe … The Best of the Best of 2010: | Posted on January 3, 2011 at 8:35 AM …
The Possessed, Elif Batuman (8). Editor: Lorin Stein at Farrar, Straus. Agent: Elyse Cheney at Elyse Cheney Agency …

Books to look out for in the next six months | Books | The Guardian
Saturday 8 January 2011

[. . .]

APRIL

[. . .]

Literature

Elif Batuman’s The Possessed (Granta) is a deeply clever and very funny collection of essays: half memoir, half love-letter to the Russian literary greats. The book has been feted in America: Slate called it a “cross between Borges and Borat” while the New York Times said the essays “unfold comically and intellectually as if Ms Batuman were channelling Janet Malcolm by way of Woody Allen”. Expect similar raves here.
Paul Laity

“1 The Possessed by Elif Batuman In the category of books you write to get out of doing your homework, this hilarious collection of discursive essays on and around Russian literature– and the nonfiction characters who inhabit the territory– ranks among my favorites. Elif Batuman has a keen ear for language, an eye for the absurd, and a gift for spinning misery, dissonance, and pretty much anything you can name into gold.”

Flavorwire » 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists Announced

[. . .]

Our pick: Elif Batuman. You could tell just from the titles we were going to pick this one, couldn’t you? Though we admit to not having read all the works on this list, we think Batuman’s clever writing is a shining example of the direction literary criticism is headed. Plus, we really dig Tolstoy.

Book Group Buzz – Discussion of Book Clubs, Reading Lists, and Literary News – Booklist Online » Best of 2010 Megalist: Top 11 Narrative Nonfiction

5. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman (16 votes to date)

Graced with a wonderful graphic art cover, Batuman’s book blends travelogue, memoir, and tales of academia with literary scholarship. Compiled from a series of popular magazine articles, The Possessed has humor, pathos, and plenty of surprises.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman – review
Elif Batuman’s comical treatise on reading Russian literature introduces an exciting, if not entirely original, new talent
Francis Spufford
The Observer, Sunday 10 April 2011

I’ve now read The Possessed by Elif Batuman, in part because Brit recommended it and in part because she complained about exactly the objection to the Kindle that most annoys me: I don’t use a Kindle because I love books. (Not only is this a category mistake (the book is not the physical object) but it is usually said with unearned smug moral superioty.)

I quite liked the book and think you will too, and thus I recommend it. But I do want to quibble with one thing Brit said, which is that The Possessed is a memoir. It is quite clear to me that this is not a memoir, but a novel.

The New Yorker
The Book Bench
August 11, 2011
THE 2011 PEN HONOREES IN THE NEW YORKER
Posted by Stacey Mickelbart

[. . .]

Elif Batuman was also a runner-up for the PEN/Diamonstein-Speilvegel Award for the Art of the Essay for her book “The Possessed,” a portion of which appeared in the magazine as “The Ice Resistance” (subscription required). She recently profiled Turkish soccer fans in our pages (subscription required).

Canadian Slavonic Papers / Mar 2011
How the Curd Was Clotted: Accounting for Isaac Babel… and a Life of Literature*
by Vinokur, Val

[. . .]

The Possessed is a mixed grill of much study. Its hallucinatory hilarity will be instantly and painfully recognized by anyone who has ever been possessed by books and surrounded by others likewise possessed.

VAL VINOKUR is the Undergraduate Director of literary studies and Director of Jewish Studies at Eugene Lang College (The New School). A Guggenheim Fellow in the field of translation, he is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mande Is tarn, L�vinas (Northwestern University Press, 2008). His writing has appeared in The Boston Review, McSweeney’s, The Russian Review, Ze ek, and Common Knowledge.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
Batuman is a winning guide to the surreal worlds of Russian literature conferences, American graduate school and truly terrible language exchange programmes. Through all her globetrotting misadventures and encounters with academic monomania, her passion for the Russian classics is undiminished
Read an extract from The Possessed
Read Ian Sansom’s review

P G Wodehouse took a bleak view of Russian novelists. Vladimir Brusiloff, introduced to his readers in The Clicking of Cuthbert, specialised in “grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, where the moujik decided to commit suicide”.

Perhaps if Wodehouse had met Elif Batuman, New Yorker writer and literary critic, she might have persuaded him, as she does us, that reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin and company has (give or take a depressed moujik or two) much to offer the open-minded reader.

The Possessed is a startling collection of essays on reading: funny, wise and imbued with Batuman’s particular brand of scattershot brilliance. [. . .]

The Guardian
Books of the year 2011
A novel about a dinner-party guest who won’t leave, a history of Henry VII, an inquiry into madness … Which books have most impressed our writers this year?
Friday 25 November 2011 13.27 EST

[. . .]

Roddy Doyle
We live in a time of deep recession but, here in Dublin, things still start at “brilliant” and work their way up. The Outlaw Album (Sceptre) is a collection of stories by one of the world’s great novelists, Daniel Woodrell, and it’s brilliant. I’m fond of big dark Russian books, so I loved Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Granta). It’s exhilarating, funny and … brilliant. Jennifer Egan’s novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (Corsair), is so good, so original, so surprising and wonderful – it’s just absolutely fuckin’ brilliant.

Alice Oswald’s book of poetry, Memorial (Faber, £12.99), was the most imaginative book of the year. It tells relentlessly and movingly the names and deaths of the hoplites and Trojan foot soldiers of The Iliad: surely a new standard text for Remembrance Sunday. The Possessed by Elif Batuman (Granta, £16.99) was the quirkiest book of the year – starting with the illustration of Tolstoy playing tennis on the cover. A post-graduate student of Russian literature turns her academic pursuit into very amusing travel writing. Alasdair Gray failed to win the James Tait Black biography prize this year but he produced the most beautiful book of 2011 with A Life In Pictures (Canongate, £35). The first 20 pages are ravishing and fully repay the cover price.

It is safe to say that the studying-for-a-PhD-in-Russian-literature memoir is a thinly populated genre. But Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Granta) is anarchically funny and, ultimately, a hymn to the pleasure of reading. Maria Edgeworth’s re-issued Patronage (Sort Of Books), written in the same year as Mansfield Park, has a roller-coaster plot that made it the perfect summer-holiday read. And this Christmas I plan to hole up with CJ Sansom’s backlist. I’ve just finished Dissolution (Pan) and the remainder make a reassuringly high pile.

Also in the vein of Russian literature (or meditations on it), I closed out the week by re-reading Elif Batuman’s The Possessed for WORD’s Classics Book Group, and found it as compelling as I had on the first go-round. Given that Batuman’s been a regular presence in The New Yorker as of late, I’m hoping that another collection of her work isn’t far off.

THE POSSESSED Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by ELIF BATUMAN Granta Pounds 8.99/ebook Pounds 8.99

Batuman’s refreshingly unlikely memoir recounts how — on a whim, after ploughing through Anna Karenina one summer at her grandmother’s house in Turkey — she decided to devote her life to studying the great Russian novelists. Over the seven years of her doctorate at Stanford, she then spent most of her time trying to escape: to a conference at Tolstoy’s homestead, to Chekhov’s house, even (by mistake) to Uzbekistan. Yet into these travels she weaves her witty, illuminating observations on the relationship between books and life, all the while surrendering to the mad passion that has set her in hot pursuit of Babel and Dostoevsky. The result is the funniest book you’re ever likely to read about Russian fiction.

Three very different examples of life writing published in paperback this month. As reviewer Ian Sansom noted, “there are now hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of memoiristic sub-genres for readers to choose from: memoirs about dogs and cats; memoirs purportedly by dogs and cats; memoirs by the abused; memoirs by the families of the abused who deny that the abused were abused …” However, Sansom concedes, it is a “pretty safe bet that Elif Batuman’s The Possessed is the only memoir ever written about – or ever likely to be written about – studying Russian literature at Stanford University.”

The book, longlisted for last year’s Guardian First Book award , weaves anecdotes and literary criticism around Batuman’s tales of her adventures in America, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Russia. “In some complicated way,” concludes Sansom. “The Possessed is a book about the relationship between art and life. But it’s also a simple book about the relationship between art and life. Or, rather, it’s a complicated book about the simple relationship between the two. In the end, all memoirs tend to end up as a defence of something, or someone – usually oneself. Batuman’s is a defence of reading as a form of living.”

From Elif Batuman is The Two Lives, the debut novel from lauded essayist/journalist and author of The Possessed. The agency described the novel as “eight self-standing but interconnected chapters” that “revisit the territory of eight articles Batuman actually reported in Italy, Israel, and Turkey… but interwoven with the kinds of human backstories that never make it into a nonfiction feature”; no rights yet sold, and delivery is set for September

This is a quirky book of essays. It’s hard to imagine a literary study of Russian fiction being laugh-aloud funny, but reading it on a train, I noticed only too late that my co-passengers were staring as if I were a lunatic on the loose.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

CAPTCHA Code

Currently you have JavaScript disabled. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page.Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser.